Valencian floods: the ugly

After two days of severe weather warnings from the meteorological service, the alert level moved to red on the third day. The president of the Valencian community, the region on Spain’s Mediterranean coast embracing the provinces of Castellón in the North, Valencia in the centre and Alicante in the south, cancelled classes for 20,000 schoolkids, upped staffing on the 112 telephone emergency service, and strengthened support for dependent people and the homeless.

It's the regional Justice Minister who has direct responsibility for emergency services. She decided that, though the region was still on a lower level of alert than would have made it mandatory, she would summon the Integrated Centre for Coordinated Operations, the CECOPI, ‘given the gravity of the situation’.

That meant that regional and national resources were activated and coordinated when rivers began to burst their banks. Just three lives were lost. Three too many, for sure, but given the severity of the flood, about as low as one could hope.

‘Hold on, hold on,’ I hear you cry, ‘I thought there’d been more than 200 deaths.’

Ah, yes. But the 200+ deaths were in the floods last month in the province of Valencia. I was talking about the 2019 floods, in Alicante. That flood was less bad than this year’s, but even taking that into account, the contrast is appalling.

The Alicante floods

What changed? Well, it was all down to how the Valencian government handled the crisis. In 2019, the President was the Socialist Ximo Puig, but this year it’s Carlos Mazón, from the Popular Party, the PP, Spain’s Conservatives. A comparison between their reactions is instructive (here’s a Spanish account).

When a journalist asked him to name the worst problem besetting a senior politician, the former British Prime Minister, Harold MacMillan, replied, ‘events, my dear boy, events’. Harold MacMillan and Ximo Puig apparently had the bandwidth to deal with events, such as the Cuban missile crisis (MacMillan) and the Alicante floods (Puig). Mazón, however, simply has much too much on his plate for such matters.

Where in 2019 peparations begans four days before the floods, when they hit this year, on 29 October, nothing was ready. A meeting of the Valencian government took place at 9:00 in the morning, but the subject of a possible flood didn’t even come up.

By contrast, the representative of central government in the region, Pilar Bernabé, cleared her diary. At 9:30, she starting contacting the mayors of the towns most at risk to warn them of what might be coming, though that wasn’t her job.

At midday, Mazón had another crucial task to deal with. He gave a presentation of the Community’s digital health policy. A flood, you see, is a momentary event, even if clearing it up can take months, and it only affects a minority of the region’s population, whereas a digital health policy is for years and affects everyone.

Bernabé, the central government representative, made four phone calls offering help to Salomé Pradas, the Valencian Justice Minister and therefore, as in 2019, the politician most directly responsible for handling emergencies.  Pradas turned down the offer three times. Later, she would deny this, but the records reveal that her denial wasn’t (how shall I put this?) entirely accurate.

It was on the fourth call that Pradas finally accepted help, but only for the Requena-Utiel area within the Valencian Community. 

At 14:30, with the floods under way, the first report came in of a missing person. The Interior Minister decided to summon the CECOPI, which had happened in 2019 on the day before the storms struck. In 2024, the meeting was summoned with the flooding already underway, and given the difficulty of getting people together, it only started at 17:00. Even then, no decision could be taken because Mazón, the President, was missing.

He'd been obliged to absent himself for a crucial lunch appointment. Since it, oddly, didn’t appear in his diary, he’s had to explain it since. The soul of discretion, he at first said it was a private appointment, no doubt out of discretion towards his guest, before announcing that it was a working lunch, and only admitting under pressure that his guest was a journalist, Maribel Vilaplana. He wanted to see her take over the regional TV service, À Punt. She says that it was a relatively brief meal, as lunches go in Spain, lasting only from 15:00 to 17:15. She has also said that he made no mention of any kind of difficulties in the region, which may be a tribute to an essential quality of a leader, to stay calm in a crisis. Or it maybe not.

She also says she turned down the À Punt job.

Mazón and Vilaplana

Incidentally, after he heard about her lunch, Vilaplana’s ex-husband put up a tweet saying ‘seven years happily divorced’. I’m not quite sure what that means. Somehow, though, that enigmatic quality makes it feel amusing to me.

Mazón clearly had other urgent concerns, because he only made it to the CECOPI meeting at 19:00 or, according to other reports, at 19:30. By this time, the authority managing the Jucar river basin in which the flooding took place, had sent 198 messages to the CECOPI, so I imagine Mazón wisely felt he had enough information to take urgent action. Especially since the emergency phone service 112 had collapsed under the weight of calls for help.

Mazón issued the first alert at 20:11. You may remember that in my last post I talked about a driver telling a journalist that he received it in his car, with water already up to his chin.

As it happens, 95 soldiers from the Emergency Military Unit (UME) had gone into action earlier in the day, without waiting for orders. Those were small numbers, but I imagine the people they saved from drowning were grateful to see them.

Now, with Mazón finding the time in his busy schedule to issue a call for national help, the central government began to mobilise far more people. Of course, that takes time, and, with the late start, numbers only reached their maximum level by 4 November. By then there were 7800 soldiers working in the affected areas, backed by 5000 more in logistical and coordinating roles. This was the largest ever deployment of Spanish troops in peacetime. Some 9000 police were also at work, along with firefighters and other emergency service people from all over Spain and even from abroad: Italy and France sent help, and I also saw teams from Morocco and Mexico.

The UME at work in one of the worst-hit areas, Paiporta

At first, Mazón expressed his heartfelt thanks to the central government, headed by the Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez. This is no more than you’d expect from someone with any kind of sense of decency. However, it sadly reveals how little he’s used to the demands of party politics. A Conservative politician saying nice things about a Socialist Prime Minister? It wouldn’t do at all.

Fortunately, Mazón’s party, the PP, has leaders who understand the subtleties of political work. They quickly knocked Mazón into line. He then showed that he’s a quick learner, when tutored, by launching some well-honed attacks on such national bodies as the Meteorological Service and the Jucar River authority. Red alerts? A hundred and ninety-eight messages? How’s that in any way an adequate response to a crisis when the man responsible for dealing with it is as busy as Mazón?

And he certainly is the man responsible. Indeed, he’s jealous of that responsibility. It’s true that in a moment of weakness, the national PP leaders made the mistake of criticising Pedro Sánchez for not taking direct control of the response to the flood, something he has no constitutional authority to do. They soon dropped that criticism, however, when they realised it meant that they were implicitly criticising their own man in charge of Valencia, and they certainly didn’t want to do that. They need him there, not least because following the floods there are lucrative reconstruction contracts to be awarded. 

This is especially important because, given the emergency, contracts can be awarded without any kind of competitive procurement process. Competitive tendering is so tedious, a bureaucratic process which stops you just awarding contracts where you want to. Which means you can’t hand them out to your friends, and your friends are the people you trust most, aren’t they? And people you trust are vital in a crisis like this one.

Since he doesn’t have to go through a competitive process, Mazón has been able to award some contracts to people he feels he can count on. For instance, two contracts, worth 12.9 million euros, have gone to a company called Ocide Construcción. It’s the subject of a corruption probe by the police at the moment, concerning bribes paid to a lawyer working for a former Mayor of Valenica, Rita Barberá. She’s been dead for nearly eight years, making it all sound a bit like ancient history, for a busy man with problems to deal with in the present and no time for the past, or for mere allegations of wrongdoing.

Meanwhile, the campaign against central government keeps ticking along. Why, that interesting semi-trade union, Manons Limpias (Clean Hands), brought cases against the national meteorological service and the River Jucar Authority for negligent homicide in the floods. Manos Limpias have been doing a great job on the Prime Minister’s wife, Begonia Gómez, pursuing her through the courts even though the police and various judges have said the allegations against her are groundless. Just keeping that kind of thing going creates an atmosphere in which voters wonder whether there can be smoke without fire. And isn’t it sophisticated to go after the Prime Minister’s wife rather than the Prime Minister himself? It gives him much less chance to respond and may well cause him more grief.

Sadly, though, the judge hearing the case against the Meteorological Service and the Jucar authority, threw out those suits on the basis that there was no case to answer. Since Manos Limpias had also brought cases against Mazón himself, and those have been allowed to stand, I imagine he has serious doubts about how unbiased the judge is.

Still, overall the campaign’s not going too badly. It’s focused on the late arrival of the army, and the army is a national body and not a local one, so it’s easy to build on the understandable anger of the victims of the floods and turn it against the central government. Focusing on the delays for which the Mazón administration was responsible could distract from the attack on the Sánchez government. And that’s what matters.

Of course, some might feel that after the good of the floods (the pouring in of volunteers) and the bad (the destruction and deaths) that I mentioned last time, the political fallout is the ugliest side of this dismal business. But that’s to misunderstand right-wing politics in our time.

After all, as Trump has shown in the States, it’s getting to power that counts. Not how you get there.

Floods in Valencia: the good and the bad before the ugly

It was strange to wake up to eery stillness. Outside the city of Valencia, our place is usually quiet, but all the same there’s always a slight background noise of traffic, on the distant main road. But this time, there was practically nothing. 

It felt like the Covid lockdown, when muted mornings were standard. And indeed we were in a sense locked down. The government of the Valencian region had decreed that no cars should take to the roads until the evening. Why? There’d been a warning of heavy rain and the authorities were taking no risks.

The English proverb is ‘the burned hand fears the fire’. The French equivalent is more to the point, ‘the scalded cat fears cold water’, suggesting that once we’ve suffered harm from something really dangerous, we learn to fear even what isn’t. And then there’s the saying about locking the stable door after the horse has bolted. 

Because, though there was some heavy rain that day, there was none of the heavy flooding that sweeps cars away, fills houses with mud and drowns people. No, that happened over two weeks earlier, on 29 October. Then, when warnings really were needed, the regional authorities, whose duty it was, failed to issue any. 

Well, that’s not entirely true. They did issue a warning. At about 8:00 in the evening. One man later told journalists said that his mobile rang with an alert from civil protection when he was in his car and the water was already up to his chin. The first that friends of ours in Paiporta, one of the worst-hit areas, knew of what was about to happen was when they heard sirens and voices shouting, ‘the water is coming, the water is coming’. 

It's like Paul Revere, isn’t it? ‘The redcoats are coming, the redcoats are coming’. Only British soldiers trying to maintain colonial rule over insurgent American patriots are a lot easier to stop than a wall of water.

Our friend’s husband reacted as many do to a flood, if their car is an underground garage. He ran to it and drove it up to the street, before it could be submerged. That could have turned out very baldy. Many of the dead were trapped in their cars. Our friend was lucky and survived, although by the time he got home he was already up to his knees in water. As for his car, they still haven’t found it – parking it on the street was no safer than leaving it in the garage.

At least our friends had a few minutes to rescue possessions, and the good luck to live in a two-floor house, so they had somewhere to retreat to. 

Some of the moments that followed had a comic quality. They struggled to disconnect the TV from the wall, only succeeding in getting it upstairs once someone had found a screwdriver. They proudly, and laughingly, told us they’d saved their coffee machine. That may sound trivial, but once electricity had been restored, it was a boon to be able to make coffee. Above all, they avoided one of the losses that causes great grief in this kind of disaster: they got their family photos upstairs and saved their memories.

They heaped towels and cloths around the front door, but the water came in around the back. Once it reached them, it took minutes for it flood to a metre and a half up the walls of the ground floor. As it flowed in, they could do nothing but head upstairs.

We took them a Kärcher high-pressure water cleaner (that’s a devices that uses high-pressure water for cleaning, rather than a device for cleaning high-pressure water. Just saying. To avoid confusion). We were able to get within four kilometres by car but had to walk the last stretch.

And as we walked we began to see not only what’s bad about crises like this one but what’s good too. 

Volunteers on the Paiporta road

On the same road were thousands of volunteers, some heading home after a good job well done, some going in to take a turn themselves. Mostly they were young, carrying shovels or brooms, masked and in boots, sometimes with plastic bags wrapped around their legs too, since the mud in the streets was becoming increasingly infectious: sewage had mixed with it and there were also rotting bodies, principally 2950 farm animals but also, estimates suggest, several hundred pets.

Diseased sludge

The mud quickly turned toxic.

Deeper and wetter in some places than others

As we walked further into Paiporta, the mud got deeper, until we had to be careful where we stepped to avoid it flowing into our boots. There were also cars everywhere, piled up two or even three deep, where the water had simply tossed them. We saw an office which had filled with cars. Ironically, it belonged to an insurance company, though sadly it was in no state to deal with the claims the owners of the cars might make.

A different kind of traffic pile-up

Our friends live close to the waterway that burst its banks on the night of the flood. We crossed it on a bridge without parapets, as they’d been washed away. It was a strange experience, looking down into the bed of the river, now quiet and with only a residual stream of water, and think of the damage it had wreaked days earlier.

The Barranco del Poyo
In spate, it broke its banks

All around us, there were people at work. Many were volunteers. But there were also huge numbers of professionals. There were soldiers, many from UME, the military unit for emergencies, but reinforced by many more ordinary soldiers drafted in for rescue and recovery and then the cleanup. There were similar numbers of police, firefighters and other emergency service staff.

The army at work with heavy equipment
Note the (police) cavalry keeping an eye on things

Police cavalry

A great many weren’t even from Valencia. We saw fire vehicles from Barcelona, Navarra, Toledo, but that’s just what we came across. I understand there were teams from all over Spain there and even from other nations, from France and Italy, and even, as we later discovered, from Mexico.

Firemen from Toledo, near Madrid

Which takes me to uglier matters: the bitterness that has followed the flood.

Army bucket chain at work

One complaint I can understand, to be fair. Many victims felt it was taking too long to get basic services going again. It’s painful to be without drinking water or electricity for two or three days. However, for the vast majority (and that includes our friends) that’s all it took – two to three days. Another friend, from Florida, pointed out that two to three weeks without services is not unusual after hurricanes there.

Downright ugly have been the lies that have been told. Even two weeks on, we’re seeing people ranting online, ‘where is the army? Why aren’t they helping?’ Well, I can tell you where the army is. It’s on the ground helping. We saw a dozen soldiers outside our friends’ house, in a bucket chain, shifting mud out of the splash pool in their garden, which had naturally filled up with sludge.

Army helicopter above our home,
ferrying soldiers and supplies in or out of the affected areas

There were soldiers at work all over the affected areas, sometimes even with heavy equipment to clear the streets. Every day, we see large helicopters flying over our house, bringing troops or equipment in or out of the damaged zones. Statistics are dull, but just in brief, 8500 soldiers have been deployed. One of the iconic events in US history is the Battle of Yorktown, where American forces with their French allies definitively defeated the British army. The American army there was 8000-9000 strong. So the Spanish army working to help flood victims is of about the same size. Then there are 9700 police plus firemen and, of course, the hordes of volunteers for the cleanup.

If Washington’s army was big enough for that battle, the resources now deployed in the flood-damaged areas are enough for this one.

The most telling complaint is that warnings were issued too late. A lot too late, given the story of the man receiving an alert when already up to his chin in water. That was down to the regional government, specifically to its president Carlos Mazón. Initially, as ministers sent in national forces to assist, he thanked the central government for sending them. Since then, though, he’s changed his tune and taken to attacking the central government, trying to switch responsibility for the calamitous response to the floods, from his shoulders to theirs.

That’s been the ugliest reaction to the disaster. I’ll return to it shortly. This post has focused on the bad – deaths, damage, disease – and the good – volunteers and national or international health. The ugly has been the political reaction.

That deserves its own post.

Grandparenting: when Matilda gave me an art lesson

On my latest visit to her house, there came a moment when Matilda, my five-year-old granddaughter, thrust an etch-a-sketch at me and said, ‘what should I draw?’

Like an idiot, I said, ‘a horse’.

The look she gave me conveyed many things, but enthusiasm wasn’t one of them.

My suggestion had been obviously crazy. Far too difficult. Nervously I racked my mind for some easier alternative.

‘What about a house?’

Odd, isn’t it? Change one letter and a challenging drawing option turns into an elementary one. I always find that kind of linguistic oddity amusing.

‘A house?’ said Matilda, now with a smile. And got drawing.

What I was expecting was a box with the top split to form something like a roof, two windows as though they were eyes and a tall rectangle as a door, in the position of a mouth. Or possibly a nose. To complete the picture, there might be a chimney at the top with a spiral of smoke coming out of it.

A House. As one might expect a five-year-old to draw it

What I got was different.

A House. As Etch-a-Sketched by Matilda

Not everybody agrees on what we’re looking at here.

Matilda’s uncle, my middle son Michael, assures me that what I see as a bed inside the house is in fact a pair of steps leading to a door. That strikes me as far-fetched. Or should I say far-sketched?

Matilda’s grandmother Danielle agrees with me that it’s a bed, with a pillow at one end and someone’s head lying on it. However Danielle qualifies her view: ‘but it would be a cut-off head’.

It’s true that the head looks a bit bodiless. It may well be this apparent decapitation that led to Matilda herself being dissatisfied with the picture. ‘My drawing’s bad,’ she assured me, before deleting it. A deletion which suggests that she hadn’t spotted me making a more permanent record of it on my phone.

Why did I take a photograph of her drawing? 

Because I was impressed that, the way I interpret it, what she’d chosen to show was something from inside the house rather than a dull exterior. She’d presented the life within and not just the structure without. In other words, more than a house, she’d drawn a home.

I think that’s impressive.

Obviously, I could check out whether she agrees with my interpretation. ‘You could always ask her what she drew,’ Michael urges me. 

He’s right, of course. But I’m not sure she’d tell me. And I’m not sure I want to know anyway. I rather like the uncertainty. Is it just a door? Is it a decapitated individual in a bed? Or is it just someone lying down to rest from the stress of outside life?

I don’t know and I like it that way. It means we can choose our own interpretation. And that strikes me as the richness of art.

Postscript

Talking about art, here’s another Matilda story.

The most celebrated painter from Valencia, where we now live, is Joaquín Sorolla. Why, the main station, to which I’m heading today after my visit to Matilda and Elliott, is even called after him. No year seems to go by without some new Sorolla exhibition in the city, if not two or three, and the top floor of the  Museum of Fine Arts is dedicated to Sorolla and his contemporaries.

Among the paintings by Sorolla’s contemporaries on show is one that always gets me smiling. It’s called La Mosca, The Fly, and it was painted in 1897 by the artist Cecilio Pla. A commentator I’ve read calls the smile in the painting ‘contagious’, which is just how it feels to me. 

La Mosca by Cecilio Pla

I find the work playful, humorous, and quite simply fun.

Now in Matilda’s parents’ kitchen the curtains, though I suspect of a slightly less expensive fabric than in the house of a late nineteenth-century upper-middle-class family, nonetheless make me think of the painting. So for a while now I’ve been trying to get Matilda to emulate the whimsical pose of the painting in her own kitchen. On this visit, I was finally able to do so. 

The result was at least as playful, humorous and fun as Pla’s piece. Though with a distinctively Matilda touch to it. Apparently, it didn’t occur to Pla to have his model stick out her tongue – that was all Matilda. 

But, hey, doesn’t that just make it all the more playful?

Matilda as La Mosca, by me

Sharpness to cool

There are things to establish when you move somewhere new. You know, find a doctor, identify a well-supplied grocer, work out your way around the local bureaucracy. And, of course, get yourself a good hairdresser.

The hairdresser we found when we moved to Spain was in the city of Valencia itself, which was a bit of a bore, since we live outside it, and had to travel in to get our hair cut. But he was great and so we stuck with him. Apart from his skill in hairdressing, I liked the fact that he was German – not the most likely nationality for a hairdresser in Spain – which gave me a rare opportunity to practise my German.

I kept speaking German to him until I had the slightly galling realisation that he spoke near-native English. Which made his English just a tad better than my German. That’s ‘tad’ as in the difference between the professional actors of the Royal Shakespeare Company and those of a primary school nativity play.

He eventually announced to us that he was planning to leave the salon where he worked and go self-employed. That was perfect for us. Since that time, he’s been coming to our place to cut our hair, which rather reduces the time it takes us to get to him. Instead of a half-hour metro journey with walks to and from the station at each end, we now just have to get from our living room to the back patio. And ours isn’t a particularly big house.

A few months ago, my then four-year-old granddaughter Matilda announced that she wanted me to shave. She was quickly and enthusiastically seconded by Danielle. Now, for a great many years – a couple of decades or more – I used to alternate image, between bearded and clean-shaven, every few years or so. But recently, I’ve stuck with a beard for the best part of ten years. 

A change, they say, is as good as a rest, so I decided to accede to this request from such key figures as my wife and granddaughter. I shaved. That was certainly a change though I’m not sure how much of a rest it was – I feel just as tired as ever. 

Then came the first visit of our hairdresser. He examined me with a critical eye.

‘Hmm,’ he said, ‘you looked more modern with the beard.’

‘Danielle,’ I told him, ‘thinks I look younger without one.’

He shrugged.

‘Which is better?’ I asked him, ‘more modern or younger?’

‘Well...’ he said, shrugged again and left the word dangling.

‘We’ll see how you look,’ he went on, ‘with shorter hair and no beard.’

He worked his usual magic with clippers and scissors.

‘Ah,’ he said at the end, ‘you certainly look sharper.’

I was briefly distracted by the thought that it was appropriate that tools as sharp as a hairdresser’s should pass on their sharpness, but that wasn’t really the main issue, was it?

‘Sharper?’ I replied, ‘that sounds good. It feels like a step on the way to “cool”.’

‘Well…’ he said again, with a third shrug.

Then he brightened.

‘Maybe you could say that we’re working towards it.’

On the way to cool? Sounds like a surprising boon, unexpected in my 72nd year. One I’d be only too happy to take.

If only I believed that so much could be achieved with just clippers and scissors.  

Bearded or clean-shaven

Ireland: a softness in the air and a kindness in the hearts

Living in the province of Valencia in Spain gives us a lot of joy. The only serious downside, and it might be a lot more serious in coming years, is the impact of climate change. Summer temperatures climb well into the thirties (Celsius) and the rain just stops. Reservoir levels are dangerously low. Going out, say with the dogs, is uncomfortable – for them as much as for us – except in the early morning or just before dark in the evening.

I know that people like that fine Mr Trump in the US (for whom I wish nothing less than more fuel for his complaints about the electoral system) deny that anything like global warming is happening, but for people like us who are living it, we have a slightly less complacent outlook on our climate.

So it was with some joy that we headed for Ireland a couple of weeks ago. I remember a friend from the English Lake District talking to me about someone who complained to him about the rain.

‘It’s called the Lake District,’ he’d replied, ‘where do you think the lakes come from?’

Ireland is called the Emerald Isle. It doesn’t take long to work out where the green comes from. It was a tremendous relief to us to live in temperatures in the high teens and to see some rain, though of course when it came to locals, we found that we’d simply exchanged one set of complaints for another.

At home, people were saying to us, ‘oh, the heat today! Roll on September. I expect no relief before then.’

In Ireland, I overhead someone talking to her friends saying, ‘I keep waiting for the summer, and it never comes.’

Sunlight and clouds, mountains and sea, in Donegal

Well, it was good to get away from the summer for a while. Perhaps not for too long. I have to admit that grey skies and frequent showers quickly pall on me, reminding me much too much of my youth in England. But I have to confess it was good not to have that oppressive heat weighing me down, or indeed it was even good to remember what it’s like to feel cold, despite a light sweater and jacket (waterproof jacket, of course).

All this culminated in Enniskillen. 

We spent most of our time in Donegal, which has the wonderful distinction of including the most northerly part of Ireland, without being in Northern Ireland. It’s in the Republic. But, often called ‘the forgotten county’, it’s remote from Dublin and most routes to and from it cross the territory of Northern Ireland, which lies within the United Kingdom. That of course is a consequence of the partition of Ireland I talked about earlier this month, a partition agreed at a peace conference in London at which the Irish delegation had been led by Michael Collins. After agreeing to the treaty, he said that he’d just signed his death warrant – as indeed he had.

Enniskillen is in Northern Ireland, and it was on our route back from Donegal to Dublin Airport. I wanted to see it because I’d heard it was a lovely city, on an island between two lakes, or perhaps two sections of the same lake, Lough Erne. Years ago I heard that it never rains in Enniskillen, you just get a ‘softness in the air’.

Well, when we got there, with two friends from Valencia, Concha and Manolo, we found that the air had become immensely soft indeed. So soft that we were soaked within minutes of getting out of our cars. So soaked that Danielle and I both had to change at Dublin airport to avoid flying home in damp clothes and shoes.

That reminded of the words of Winston Churchill, who as a government minister had helped craft the agreement that partitioned Ireland. A year later the tensions between Protestants committed to the Union with Britain and Catholics seeking a united, independent Ireland, had surfaced again, specifically about who should get two of the counties of the North of the island. Churchill talked about how ‘we see the dreary steeples of Fermanagh and Tyrone emerging once again’.

Well, Enniskillen is in County Fermanagh. And I was delighted to be able to take a photo of one of its steeples in the rain. Looking suitably dreary, though it probably wouldn't have, had there been a little sun.

A dreary steeple in Enniskillen, Fermanagh

Fortunately, not everything we experienced in Enniskillen was dreary. On the contrary. When we parked our cars, we found that the pay machines for the car park didn’t allow payment by credit card. A man walking past asked us whether we needed change.

‘It seems we do, and we don’t have any pounds,’ we told him.

Without our asking him for anything, and refusing our offer of euros in return, he reached into his pocket and pulled out two pound coins, enough for our car and our friends’ to stay as long in Enniskillen as we could stand it in the rain. 

You don’t often find someone spontaneously, and enthusiastically, offering money, for nothing in return, to complete strangers. In fact, it’s only happened to me once before. Just ten days earlier, in Donegal, where we were trying to pay for a car park and bemoaning the fact that we didn’t have a euro coin.

‘Do you need a euro coin?’ asked a passing woman, thrusting one into our hands.

Well, the Irish weather may be less than ideal, but the people are great. I remember once, as a much younger man, asking for change for a two-franc coin in Geneva – change, not a gift – and being refused, including by a man who told me that he worked for a living (which I hadn’t doubted in the first place). Spontaneous generosity instead of hard words? Not hard to decide which is preferable.

It was particularly poignant to see such warmth on both sides of a border that has caused such suffering and so much death. The people seem to be one, with only the border to divide them. Ah, the power of religion, to set up such barriers between personalities that have so much in common.

And, to be honest, even if it rains a bit more than I’d like, after a couple of months of roasting summer, the Irish cool and wet were, I admit, a great relief, just as the kindness was a joy.

The memories of the Irish

‘The problem,’ the saying goes, ‘is the English can't remember history, while the Irish can't forget it’. 

My mother gave me a fine illustration of the truth of the notion. Back in the 1930s (the late 1930s, I imagine, since she was born in 1924) an Irish friend invited her to a rally in England addressed by an Irish patriot. I think she said it was the son of the murdered Irish Republican leader, Michael Collins, which would make it a great story, had Collins ever had a son. 

Maybe it was just one of his associates.

‘I should warn you,’ her friend told my mother, ‘he’ll be mentioning Oliver Cromwell within the first ten minutes of his talk.’

In the event, it was under five minutes.

Cromwell, many English people know, was the man who led the New Model Army in seventeenth-century England. The uprising it drove put a big dent in the doctrine of the divine right of kings, by putting a definitive end to a king who believed in it (it cut off Charles I’s head, which is pretty definitive). What a lot fewer remember is that Cromwell was also the man who applied in Ireland what the Roman historian Tacitus accused his compatriots of doing in their conquered territories: Rome, he said, made a desert and called it peace. Cromwell pacified Ireland with sword and flame. The Irish haven’t forgiven him (and they shouldn’t) but nor have they forgotten (which maybe for their peace of mind they should).

I’m an Englishman and therefore cursed – or possibly blessed – by a short memory. Even so, as Danielle and I turned up in Dublin a few days ago, I remembered clearly when we were last there together. It was with two of our sons, then aged five and three, back in 1988. This time, it was on our way to meet one of those sons, now 40, and our daughter-in-law, with their own children, aged five and three. 

As we were reminded by a couple of people in Dublin this time, 1988 was the year of the Dublin millennium. We enjoyed some of the events associated with the celebrations, though they left me a little confused. There were references to all sorts of things happening in Dublin rather over a thousand years earlier, including the foundation of the city, but no mention of anything particular in 988.

In the end, I tackled a young actor in Viking costume who’d been re-enacting tenth-century events.

‘If nothing particular happened in in 988, why are you celebrating the millennium in 1988?’ I asked.

‘Ah,’ he replied, ‘we missed the actual anniversary, but when we saw the success Cork made of its 800th anniversary in 1985, we decided to have a celebration ourselves, even if it’s a few decades late. We promise to get it right next time.’

I think it was the Irish wit of the reply that appealed to me most. 

It was lovely to be back in Dublin with Danielle. And I was intrigued to see a mural on a hoarding near where we spent the night.

Curious mural in Dublin

It showed the face of Michael Collins with a great quotation from him: ‘Give us the future… we’ve had enough of your past…’

The past Britain – specifically England – gifted Ireland was dismal. It was by no means just Cromwell’s massacres that blackened it. His campaign completed an extraordinary transfer of land to alien ownership, specifically to the English and Protestants. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, something like 50% of Irish land had been owned by Irish Catholics. By the time the English Civil War broke out, that proportion was down to 14%. By the end of Cromwell’s time, it was down to 5%. England didn’t just kill in Ireland, it also stole. Massively.

At the end of the following century, one of the better English Prime Ministers, William Pitt the Younger, attempted to bring in legislation to grant Irishmen equality with the English, at least in trade. He was defeated, by a coalition of legislators representing British industry, which was more than happy to see tariffs on Irish trade kept in place – even trade with Britain – to protect their own privileged position. There were regulations, too, about what industries the Irish could engage in and which they were banned from developing, again to protect English interests. In addition, Catholics – and the vast majority of the Irish were Catholics – were banned from holding any kind of public position or teaching in the universities.

The dying also continued. The terrible famine in the late 1840s cost about a million lives and a million emigrants, at a time when the total population before the Famine had been eight and a half million. Even today, the total population, of the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland together, is still not seven million. An excellent measure of Britain’s attitude to the disaster was that, when it abolished slavery, in 1833, it paid £20 million in compensation to the former slave owners. Its total aid to Ireland during the Famine was £10 million.

Nor did the killings end. Why, some even happened in Collins’s own time, including the Croke Park massacre, when British soldiers entered a stadium in Dublin and fired for a minute and a half into a crowd waiting for the start of a Gaelic football match, killing fourteen, including three children, and wounding sixty others.

So, yes, I understand why Collins felt Ireland was sick of the past. And would like to take over its own future.

Sadly, though, while the British Empire was already in decline, it was still the world’s greatest ever and had huge power. Tired of fighting after the world war and desperately short of money, Britain knew that it could defeat the Irish uprising but only by using massive force, which would be a catastrophic expense and, since it would lead to terrible killing, would be condemned by the world and even by much public opinion in Britain (think Gaza today). 

On the other hand, it was quite impossible, politically, for the British government to allow the Protestant-majority counties of Ulster to be absorbed into a separate, Catholic-dominated Irish state.

Equally, Collins knew that the Irish Republican forces, which he commanded, hadn’t the resources to impose their will on the British. Indeed, keeping the army in the field was draining the new country’s already stressed finances. 

The compromise was to partition the island. Six counties of the northeast would remain within the United Kingdom. The other twenty-six would be given quasi-independence as the Irish Free State. The compromise took the form of a Peace Treaty signed by the British and the Irish delegation to the negotiations, led by Michael Collins. 

After the signing, Collins confided to his diary ‘I tell you this, early this morning I signed my death warrant.’

Eight months later, he was proved right, when he was gunned down by members of the anti-Treaty forces led by his former comrade, Éamon De Valera.

Not many people in England know much of this. But plenty do in Ireland.

Across the Collins mural, somebody had scrawled the word ‘Traitor’.

Ah, yes. The Irish have long memories. It was fun to be back in the country and have it proved to me again.

 

Fun fakery and a fine fiesta

We like to think of ourselves as good immigrants, Danielle and I. That makes us  want to get familiar with our new host country and, specifically, with the region where we live. That’s the Autonomous Community of Valencia, as it’s grandly called, with its three provinces: Valencia itself (the one we live in) with Alicante to the south and Castellón to the north.

Now we’ve been to Castellón province several times and discovered that it has many glorious towns and much wonderful countryside, with hills and woods running from the border with Aragon to the west, down to a coastal plain with its sun-drenched Mediterranean beaches. But, somehow, until a few weeks ago, we’d never been to Castellón city itself, the place that gave the province its name. So when Danielle saw that the council was organising a guided tour of the ceramics of the city, we signed up for it.

We met the group on the edge of a fine park in the centre of town, the Ribalta Park, named for a painter, Francisco Ribalta. A fine introduction to the fine fakery we were to encounter on our tour.

Rather a fine park

Castellón likes to celebrate Ribalta as one of its most distinguished native sons. There’s even a plaque outside a Castellón house marking it as where he was born. Which is just a tad puzzling, since it’s well known, including to our guide, that he was born in Catalonia, in a town called Solsona, some 250 km away.

Castellón's House of the Storks. Which isn’t

We also visited a lovely house on the square outside the park, known as the ‘House of the Storks’. At first glance, you can see that the house owes its name to the wonderful climbing series of ceramic tiles on the front of the building, each set of which apparently rests on a bottom tile with a picture of a bird. The stork that gave its name to the building. Except that when you look closely at it, you discover that it isn’t a stork at all. 

Call that a stork?

It’s a heron. Heron House? La casa de las garzas? Did someone decide that casa de las cigüeñas sounded better? Or did an early error consecrated by simple habit establish the name in the mind of the population?

The city also has a cathedral. Except that it isn’t a cathedral. There’s a local bishop but his seat isn’t in Castellón city itself but in Segorbe, a glorious city further up the long valley that runs westwards through the province to Aragon. I’ve been told that Segorbe had hoped it would be the capital of the province and give it its name, but Castellón beat it to that honour. The bishop, though, stayed in Segorbe, so the large church in the middle of the provincial capital isn’t really a cathedral – a bishop’s main church – but a co-cathedral, a sort of associate cathedral, a tad second best.

It was funny to come across all these things that weren’t what they seemed. A native son who wasn’t. Herons claimed as storks. A church the size of a cathedral which wasn’t one. Funny and fun. But I don’t want to give the impression that everything in Castellón was just fakery. There was much that was authentic and beautiful. 

There were some fine buildings. 

And there were loads of ceramics.

On park benches:

On drinking fountains:

Even on modern buildings:

That underlined the fact that this isn’t an art for a museum, but something living and flourishing to this day.

We particularly liked the ceramic advert outside what was once a dairy. It proudly claimed that the milking was done in the presence of the public. Our guide told us that you could choose which cow you wanted your milk from.

And it wasn’t just ceramics. Just as authentic was the way the people of Castellón enjoyed themselves. We stopped for a simple but excellent lunch in a side street, rowdy and cheerful with a loud crowd, which became deafening when a hen party showed up. Group after group standing or sitting outside the cafés and restaurants of the street cheered the hen party and shouted congratulations to the bride as they danced by.

A cheerful atmosphere for lunch

As for her, boy, was she having fun. She seemed well lubricated. And she danced and sang with tremendous gusto. A real fiesta spirit.

Further enlivened by a joyful bride

It was a good way to get to know a part of our adopted region that we’d neglected before. And an excellent way to spend a day.

Giving way takes courage

‘Nothing in his life became him like the leaving it’. That’s a Shakespeare line that always amazes me by how many situations it applies to. Today, I’d say of Joe Biden that nothing in his career became him like his withdrawal from it. I’m not saying he wasn’t a good president – he had some notable achievements – but he was no longer a good candidate, at a time when his defeat would return to the White House a man determined to undermine the most fundamental values of the US constitution.

It’s obvious that standing down was immensely painful to him. That makes his action particularly courageous and admirable. It puts him into the tradition of a man like George Washington. He received a commission from the Continental Congress, the body that headed the thirteen colonies that rose against Britain, to head its armies. When he emerged victorious from the war, many feared that he would use his popularity to make himself dictator or king of the newly independent nation. Instead, he went to Congress and handed back his Commission.

Biden has shown himself a worthy heir of Washington

As I’ve said before, what he didn’t do (he didn’t seize power) is right up there in importance with what he did (he won the war). What Biden hasn't done (he’s not clinging on to the nomination) is a fine way of crowning a career including some pretty great things he did do (like post-Covid measures and initiatives to aid economic recovery).

But what happens next? 

A friend commented to me recently that Biden clinging on to the nomination would leave the Democrats with no chance of beating Trump. Replacing Biden would certainly not guarantee them victory. But it would at least give them a chance.

It was quite clear, and I got that message powerfully even from individual Americans that I know here in Spain, that many of those who dreaded the return to power of Trump couldn't bring themselves to vote for Biden, once his state of health showed him to be unfit to hold the office of President for another term. 

The frontrunner to replace him is the present Vice President, Kamala Harris. If she wins the White House, it’ll be historic: the first woman to hold the post and the second person of colour, after Barrack Obama.

However, front runner or not, she’s not even sure of the Democratic nomination yet. There are other possible candidates. They all have one advantage over Biden, which is their age. Had Biden stayed in the race, he would have been the oldest candidate ever for the presidency. Now that mantle falls on Trump’s shoulders. I hope the Democrats will be as ruthless against him as he was in using age as a weapon against Biden. That would be especially appropriate as Trump too is suffering from the effects of his advancing age, shown in speeches that are frequently incoherent and confused.

If it is Kamala Harris that faces off to him, it’s likely that he’ll attack her for being allegedly soft on drug offenders during her time as Attorney General of California. I hope he does. But I only hope that because it’ll give her the opportunity to respond by asking just how tough a sentence the law should impose on a felon convicted of fraudulently using company funds to cover up, for his own electoral purposes, an affair with a porn star.

Harris has also built herself a good reputation as a defender of abortion rights. Trump has surrounded himself with anti-abortion characters, like his running mate JD Vance. I’d love to see her suggesting that it’s not at all surprising that he refuses women rights over their own bodies, seeing how little respect he’s shown for those bodies in his behaviour and, indeed, his boasts about what he likes to do to them.

I’d love to watch Trump squirming under that kind of pressure.

A century on

One hundred years ago today, what a different place Britain was.

Only a few months earlier, in September 1923, when Britain officially took up a mandate from the League of Nations to govern Palestine, the British Empire reached its greatest ever extent. Which was odd, because Britain was already decidedly on the downward slope. It had been the banker to the world up to the First World War ten years earlier, but had emerged from that conflict a debtor nation, indebted above all to the United States. 

One of Britain’s allies, that had provided limited but valuable assistance in the war, had been Japan. But the US, worried about Japanese competition in the Pacific, put pressure on Britain to end the alliance. There had been a time when Britain would have firmly but politely – or perhaps not politely – rejected such interference in its affairs, but those days were gone, and it complied with the American demand.

So it was never truer than in the middle 1920s that the sun never set on the British Empire, but it was also true that the Empire’s sun was already setting.

Into that world, on the 11th of July 1924, a little girl her parents decided to call Leatrice was born into the Bannister family. Anyone who knows a little about British Jewish life knows that ‘Bannister’ was one of those give-away names: most people who held it had been called ‘Bernstein’ before they showed up in England.

Nat Bannister, Leatrice’s father, had been raised in back-breaking poverty in London’s East End. He’d left school at fourteen and taken work in the lithographic printing industry. He spent the First World War avoiding military service in what he saw as an indefensible conflict, and ended up spending two years in the harsh conditions of Dartmoor prison for his pacifist pains.

His wife, Yetta, came from a more comfortable family, of more recent refugees than Nat’s, who got out of the Russian Empire not long before Russia went to war with Japan. Her father had already spent seven years in the Tsarist army and could imagine what fate awaited him in the Far East if war broke out with Japan, as he was sure it would. He was a skilled craftsman, making the uppers of shoes for people with feet deformed from birth or as a result of accident, and could provide a better childhood for his Yetta than Nat enjoyed.

Yetta was a radical and an early member of the British Communist Party, though her flirtation with Communism didn’t last long. It was at a public meeting which she addressed that Nat, never a member himself, first saw her. She was recovering from the death of a fiancé who’d made it through the war but then succumbed to the so-called Spanish flu, and she resisted Nat’s courtship for quite a time. She apparently once lost her temper with him, broke off the engagement she’d finally agreed to and flung the ring at him before storming off into the night. Instead of going after her, he got down on his hands and knees hunting for the ring, which he eventually found and presented to her again when she was calmer.

Leatrice grew up in a North London suburb, in an atmosphere she described as stiff with anti-Semitism. She escaped from that when she took a job as secretary to a Labour Member of Parliament and Secretary of the reformist Fabian Society. That meant she spent the latter part of the Second World War close to the circles of power, a remarkable apprenticeship for someone in her late teens to early twenties.

What she didn’t get was a higher education, to her great regret. 

Leatrice in London’s Hyde Park in 1947

After the war, when travel became possible again, she made a beeline for Paris to a typist’s job at UNESCO. There she met Leonard Beeson. Apparently, what first attracted her were his silk socks, which she got to examine closely when sitting on the floor at a party, with her back to the couch on which he was sitting more comfortably. That, apparently, was as good a start as any to a relationship that led them into a marriage lasting from 1951 until his depressingly early death in 1983.

The marriage took her from Paris to Rome, where her two sons were born. From Rome, they moved to Kinshasa in what was then called the Democratic Republic of Congo and is called that again after spending some time as Zaïre, though its relationship to democracy has always been distant. In the last of Leonard’s professional moves, they travelled from Kinshasa to New York. There she was at last able to satisfy her desire for a university education, obtaining a degree from City University of New York, with the best class (Summa Cum Laude, with highest praise) and winning herself the prestigious Phi Beta Kappa key.

The couple enjoyed a brief retirement during which they split their time between France and England. When that was ended by her widowhood, she moved to Oxford, much to the astonishment of most people who knew her, since she’d had no previous connection with the city. It suited her well though, giving her a wide new circle of friends (including the local Labour MP) and the opportunity to serve as a City Guide, which she did with great enthusiasm, until infirmity at last forced her to stop.

Like her first quarter century, she lived her last in England. A profoundly different England, no longer the leading nation of a Britain that bestrode the world, but part of a middle-ranking power that was, at the time she moved back, at last building itself a future as a part of Europe. But then she was saddened, as I was, when it turned its back on that project, and on its neighbours, by voting to leave the EU, in what looked like nothing more than a last desperate grasp at global glory, something that was already slipping from its grip when Leatrice was born, and had long gone by the time she died.

Still, it was England, it was her home, she felt comfortable there, and that made it a good place to see out her last years.

She died on her 94th birthday, on 11 July 2018. So today I can raise a glass to her twice: once for the 100th anniversary of her birth, and once more to the way she managed, although unconscious at the time, to make it to one last birthday.

On my brother’s behalf and my own, that’ll be my salute to our mother Leatrice and the remarkable life she lived in some rapidly changing times.

Leatrice with Leonard in France in the 1980s